Home Front

This resource is aimed at secondary school students and contains over 20 pages of activities.

The online materials draw on the rich collection of photos and the brief history provided in the Australians in World War I: Home Front commemorative publication, which was printed in early 2012 and is the fifth and final book in the series.

Chapter 5: Early shocks (1914–15)

Though only a few months old, the war was sending shivers through Australian society. Imports and investment dried up, as did many markets for exports. Ships were commandeered for military use. Cautious employers shut mines and shops. The federal government printed more money. Prices rose and unemployment doubled. Families who had usually made ends meet could no longer do so. 'Well, daddy, I suppose it’s alright', a six-year-old answered two months after the war began, when she was told she had a new baby sister, ‘but it seems to me that there’s a lot of things we need more’.1

The shivers went further than the economy. Politicians talked about war instead of wages and empire instead of Australia. Collections were taken in factories to support soldiers as well as industrial strikes. Military camps sprang up overnight. Around them hovered knots of young women who, when questioned by the police, insisted they were waitresses.2

Still, as a Methodist preacher said in Adelaide, perhaps strains like these were to be welcomed as a kind of test that would make Australia stronger in the end.3 Certainly Australians seemed united in the summer of late 1914 and early 1915. Country towns competed to raise money and recruits. Reports that the German army was behaving atrociously in occupied Belgium, and that German warships had shelled English towns, aroused widespread anger. There was joy when the Australian warship Sydney sank the German warship Emden, and eagerness to see how the AIF would perform in battle.

1.Register (Adelaide), 24 October 1914, p. 12 (I have recast the quote from the supposed child’s voice it was rendered in).